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From the Article"It's not true that voters prefer character over issues. Voters would be perfectly happy to vote for the national health care system that they've wanted for decades. It's just that those things aren't options. The party managers - or, basically, the public relations industry that sells commodities on television and markets candidates in the same way that they market commodities. When you see an ad on television, you don't expect to learn anything from it. If we had a free market of the kind economists discuss, in which informed consumers make rational choices, General Motors would post on television the characteristics of the cars they're selling. They don't do that. What they do is try to create illusions, using complicated graphics, a famous actress driving up to heaven, or something like that. The point is to delude and marginalize the public, so that uninformed consumers will make irrational choices. When you market candidates, it's the same thing - keep away from the issues, that's too dangerous because the public doesn't agree with you on the issues. So what you have is character, trivialities, personal issues - somebody's pastor says something, Clinton made a mistake when she talked about Bosnia. The Pew research foundation released a study of press coverage of the primaries. The top story was Rev. Jeremy Wright's sermons. Second was the role of the "superdelegates." Third was whether Obama misformulated his comment about "bitterness" of the electorate over the economy. And on down to the tenth story about Clinton's misstatement concerning Bosnia. All of the top stories listed were about marginal irrelevancies. None brought up the stand of the candidates on any issue - what the vast majority of the public wants to hear. You know, anything but the issues. So the population just doesn't know what the issues are, and this is quite obvious."This is obvious to all of us isn't it? What other opinion is there except that we are carefully diverted away from real issues to focus on trivialities so that we can not have a say on the issues. If you avoid them as topics, and focus on character you can effectively silence the population and keep them out of interfering with what you want to do.

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